


a treatise on the importance of ink

by Contra



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Also I love Patty, Basically Stan's entire life from the eighties to the phone call, But also Stan living and thriving and falling in love, Character Study, Extremely Stan-centric, F/M, Suicide, like literally no other losers except mike briefly in the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2020-10-17 21:09:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20627582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Contra/pseuds/Contra
Summary: Stan’s life. // Or: Stan Uris doesn’t remember, but he learns to navigate the map of blind spots in his mind.





	a treatise on the importance of ink

**Author's Note:**

> Basically, this is an unholy mix of movie canon, book canon and no canon at all, though I'm pretty sure it should be understandable even if you only know either book or movie.  
(It's set in the movie timeline-wise though, so Stan is a kid in the eighties)
> 
> MAJOR FUCKING TRIGGER WARNING: HE KILLS HIMSELF IN THIS. Yeah I hate it too, because he's my favourite character and deserved much better, and this is also kiiiiiiiiiiinda me trying to come to terms with it.
> 
> Oh also, he's in New York during 9/11 (not in the towers or anything though and there's no graphic description of the attacks), so if that's bad for you, maybe skip this, too.
> 
> I listened to Tom Waits - Mockingbird while I wrote this.
> 
> Also, talk to me about Stan.

Stan Uris’ life starts when he forgets it. After

(that summer)

(_IT_)

moving away from Derry to Atlanta in 1990, he learns that life means exchange. He exchanges his kippa for a straight-edged facon cut that only retains a hint of his curls. He exchanges his collection of books about ornithology and fauna for business textbooks and copies of the Wall Street Journal that he keeps in strict chronological order. He exchanges smiles with the other kids at his new school, but never gets close to any of them, instead pouring his heart completely into his school work.

On some level, he is aware that he’s trading in his memory, too. There is a folder labeled “Derry” in his head and while it terrifies him too much to linger on it for long, he knows his own internal filing system well enough to keep track of how it fades in a (supernatural) (methodical) steady and relentless manner that sets it apart from everything else.

It’s not that Stan doesn’t normally forget stuff. He does. It’s normal. Everybody forgets.

But the Derry memories specifically are strange in that they disappear subsequently, systematically, as if someone did sort them, and then started to rip them out one after the other, slowly and surely, one at a time. (Rips them out.)(Eats them.)

In the beginning he tried to fight it. He repeated the names of the missing kids, one after the other. Betty Ripsom. Georgie Denbrough. Eddie Corcoran. Mornings and evenings. Like the Shma. He knows there were more of them, struggles to remember them. There were twelve names. There were ten names. There were five names. There are three.

(But he still knows there were twelve names the very first time he did it.)

(And then much, much later, he won’t even know there were twelve names. But he knows there were more than three.)

Life is exchange, though, and he can observe that for every memory he loses, he gets something in return. He gets a very prestigious internship at Farland & Garners, the big accounting firm that usually only takes college students and not high school kids. He is breathlesslessly happy as he comes home that evening, his father’s pride still humming around him like a comforting, tangible static. But that night, as he goes to bed, he tries to recite the names again. (There were twelve names in the beginning, but this morning he only knew three.)

He cannot remember a single one of them.

There were twelve, he thinks. One of them was Bill’s little brother.

In the beginning, he’d tried writing it all down, drawing maps of the Barrens and even Derry’s streets, chronological timelines of events, clumsy unskillful drawings of him and the Losers. But when the papers disappeared, when the words inexplicably faded even after he taped them to his wall, that’s when he stopped. It was an entirely rational decision. He knew that he could deal with losing his memory, it is a common human failure. But he knew with absolute certainty that he would not be able to live in a world that does not obey the laws of permanence of ballpoint pen ink.

The last time he sees the scar on his hand is during the last minutes of his SATs.

He looks at it and is hit with a suffocating wave of strange almost-sadness as he puts his pencil down. He doesn’t know what just happened and he doesn’t know what will happen after now, but he is aware of something, something right in between.

A few weeks later, he will hold his perfect score result in unbroken, unscarred hands.

It’s not like he can complain, really. He trades a wordlessly terrifying past for a spotless, shiny future. So when he fishes his Harvard admission letter out of the mail, already knowing its contents before he opens it, there’s only a small worried voice in his head and Stan is used to it by now.

He sits in the introduction lecture and thinks, I’m going forward, I’m not going to look back. It’s not like there even is

(Stanley)

like there’s anything to look back _on._ He’s free now, finally he’s

(Stan the Man, hey. **Jew Boy**)

himself, just himself, ready to start his life the way he wants it. For the first time that he can remember, he’s actually completely happy. Not that that’s saying a lot. I made it, he thinks. His shirt is a bit too starched, which gives it a cardboard like texture and his hair makes it obvious that he brushed it painfully for ten straight minutes this morning. I made it to here.

(Ben. Beverly. Bill. Eddie. Mike. Richie.

Their names slipped quietly off the tip of his tongue.)

He meets Patty Blum, who wants to major in English and Art History, at the semester opening party at AEPi and she’s bright and brilliant and beautiful in a way that he can’t fully grasp. There’s something behind

(her eyes, they’re looking right at him, like-)

her smile that is warm and almost familiar. “Hey,” she says, and she’s talking in that slightly-tipsy interested college freshman girl voice that he thought only happened in movies, or at least not to guys like him. But she’s here and she means it. And so he lets her draw him into a conversation that circles in wide sweeping loops from the collapse of the Soviet Union to disco music to her childhood dog that died last summer, while his arm, tentatively, incredulously, loops around her shoulder instead.

“What about you?” she asks,

(and for a second a voice inside of him is tempted to say, _you know what Patty? I think I died last summer too. Or maybe the summer before that, I can’t really remember. I think I sliced my wrists on a broken Coca Cola bottle, what do you think about that? Do you like Coca Cola? You have to, right? We won the Cold War with it. Beat the Russkies with our fucking Coca Cola._

He doesn’t know that voice except that he does and it_ terrifies_ him,_) _”where are you from?”

And Stan (who doesn’t know the voice, there is not even a voice) says, “oh, I grew up here and there, a small town in Maine, then Atlanta, my family is mostly from the East Coast though.”

“I think I had an aunt from Maine once,” Patty mentions and Stan isn’t sure what to say to that. Maine was… there was not much in Maine to talk about, was there?

But she doesn’t seem to want an answer, instead, she closes her half-tipsy college freshman girl eyes and puts her head on his shoulder.

And Stanley, eighteen years old, Harvard class of 1996, feels so relieved he could cry.

She takes him out for lunch a few days later and between his sweaty palms and awkward conversation that she inexplicably seems to find charming, he realizes he never felt this way. Her perfume is wonderful, sweet and slightly floral, and his arms are too big and weird by his side and he accidentally spends a lot of time talking about computer stuff and Wall Street investment schemes and it doesn’t even matter because she looks fascinated by it. More than that. She’s actually keeping up.

That evening, she brings him to his dorm room, even though he knows that technically it should have been the other way around, but he’d still been agonizing over how to offer it without sounding like a creep who wants to find out where she lives by the time he’d realized she had already brought him half the way home.

And then they’re at his door suddenly and saying goodbye but she doesn’t leave immediately, lingers in the chilly New England fall evening air instead and he wonders if he should hug her, but it’s her who leans forwards for the kiss and when their lips meet, suddenly, with imprecise hesitation, he actually believes it’s his first.

Slowly, over the course of their four-year degrees, they morph from the awkward teenagers trying to get to know each other into the couple that everyone rolls their eyes at into just _StanandPatty._ It’s boring the way real life perfection often is.

(There’s a moment when they’re in bed together for the very first time and Patty looks vulnerable and needy and beautiful and shy and she whispers “I haven’t actually done this before”

and Stan-

blanches _therewassomethinginthesewersdirtybadscaryIT_

for a second he’s falling, a sensation so unexpected and shocking that he loses his balance-

He ends up draped awkwardly over her, his head buried in her hair and he presses kisses into it as deeply as he can, murmuring “neither have I.”)

It’s weird how well they fit. She understands his sense of order, his need to _sort _things, to see and maintain a logical system. She understands, at least as much as he himself does, why he prays so rarely. She gifts him a collection of Staedtler mechanical pencils for his birthday and drags him to the MCZ.

She loves museums because they are filled with things she’d study if she could and he loves them because they are organized and quiet and tidy.

In short, it’s a perfect date. Until they are standing in front of a showcase with a lot of little birds and without thinking, he points at one and says, “Look at that one, the cardinal. It’s a male Fringillidae Richmondena. They’re very rare in Maine.” She smiles with delight, it’s the kind of trivia she loves, birds native to states she’s never been to, stock market futures of companies whose services she never used, odd little customs of ethnic minority groups half a world away.

“You were a bird watcher as a kid?” she asks and it’s a bit teasing, he knows she wonders about his childhood because he talks about it so rarely. He’s not intentionally keeping it secret, but at this point they’ve been a couple for so long that he knows the names of every girl she had a fight with in high school and sometimes she thinks she wouldn’t be surprised if she one day found out that he didn’t go to high school at all. If he was anyone else, it would be terrifying. But somehow, it's just Stan.

He shrugs, “I think I was,” and she nods as if this is not an incredibly weird thing to say for a guy who knows exactly what he had for lunch last Thursday – a bagel, he was very stressed - because what if he would read later that there had been a mishap at the bagel factory and everyone who had eaten one produced on that specific date was now at risk for Salmonella?

And it’s that exact part of his brain that is freaking out now, because it _doesn’t _know where the knowledge came from (_Fringillidae Richmondena Fringillidae Richmondena, wouldn’t you like to see one, Stanley?_), and it does feel infected, a Salmonella-laced fact that snuck straight into his hippocampus, out from the part of his childhood that is just blank.

(There was a folder there, labelled with the name of a town he once lived in.

He can’t remember it though, not for the life of him.)

The birds in the display case are looking at him with their tiny, fake bead eyes, reflecting the light in a way that is not alive, but also not completely lifeless and Stan starts to panic. The problem with having an internal order and logic to things is that blank spots stand out like (a blood-covered bathroom wall that someone is cleaning with Ajax, perhaps?) like (a red balloon against white, rotting flesh) like-

“I had a book,” he manages to get out and Patty looks at him with worry, grounding and familiar in the silence of the museum. “I had a book full of birds when I was a kid. Probably threw it away, though.”

She takes his hand and squeezes, pulls him away from the birds to the next room that is full of butterflies. She puts her head on his shoulder and she doesn’t ask, he loves her and _she doesn’t ask_ and he feels so relieved he could cry.

(She gets him a bird book as a Chanukkah gift that year and he looks at it in confusion for a moment until he remembers the day at the museum. He flips through the pages as if he is looking for something but he cannot even remember what. He remembers the day at the museum, though.)

"What do you want your life to be like when you're fifty?" she asks him one day, they're cuddled up on the old sofa that she has in her dorm room, which she picked up for free from another student who moved out this semester, she loves things with a history. It's a constant surprise to Stan how little it bothers her that he has none.

He shrugs. There's a vague answer he could give her that includes an accounting job and marriage and children, and there's an even vaguer, intangible answer about how he never thought much about the future because he never thought he'd have one - though he doesn't even know _why. _A thing he loves about their conversations is that she rather wants an honest, weird answer than one that he thinks will impress her, and so takes a while to think about it.

"I don't know," he finally says. "I mean I hope I'm happy. And if I'm not, I hope I have a good reason at least." He laughs bashfully, knowing it's a ridiculous answer, but she nods as if it makes sense. "What about you?" he asks back.

Now she's the one laughing, "why does that feel like a deflection?" and it occurs to Stan that it _is, _and he thinks, I hope when I'm fifty I won't deflect these kind of questions, because I think I'd actually like to have an answer, and he leans back against her, feels her heartbeat through her shirt and thinks, wherever I am at fifty, I hope I'm with you.

Her voice is soft and comforting as she's telling him all her elaborate plans, she'll have written a Nobel prize worthy novel and own four cats and live in a villa in Southern France that's full of books and paintings and she's going to be _so unbelievably happ_y and he thinks, oh God, I hope I'm with you.

And then in April before they’re due to graduate he’s in Boston looking for a graduation gift for her when he stumbles across a small shop called “Needful Things”, a beat up little second hand store with an owner that looks as old as time itself.

“Can I help you, boy?” He asks and Stan puts down the pair of Zeiss-Ikon binoculars with one cracked lense that he was examining and shakes his head politely. It always makes him a bit uncomfortable to be approached in shops when he’s just looking around.

“I’m just browsing, thank you,” he answers.

But the man doesn’t seem to hear him, murmurs “wait, I’ve got just what you need,” and before Stan can make up an excuse to escape the situation, the man pulls out a small box from somewhere behind his desk.

“Looking for something for your girl, right?” The man asks, the box is covered in dark purple velvet, and Stan’s heart suddenly stops with realization.

The ring is beautiful, gold decorated with an Art Deco leaf pattern and an oval, deep red stone set in the middle. It is completely, perfectly Patty, unique, elegant and yet playful. A timeless sort of vintage.

“How much is it?” Stan asks, mentally setting himself up for disappointment, because they’re already looking for an NYC apartment and while they’re not actively starving, they also don’t exactly have a budget for bigger expenses, and at the moment he has all of fifteen dollars in his pockets.

“Oh, it’s fifteen bucks,” the salesman says and this is how Stanley’s life has always been, orderly not because of the systems he painstakingly built up, but because of a big and terrifying current of fate running just under the surface. “The stone isn’t real, you know?”

And Stan knows, of course he knows, because Patty made him watch a documentary on the gemstone trade last month and while they watched it she’d told him she’d never wear jewelry that people had died for. Only now does he understand that while she wasn’t angling for anything or actively dropping hints, this right here had been what she was talking about, without even knowing.

Stan leaves with a promise in the back of his jeans.

(The thing about currents is that they drag you out into the wide open before you even notice and then it's too late and you're drowning.)

(The thing about currents is, before that, you _float_.)

For their graduation, Patty surprises him with a trip to Philadelphia, which is not actually that big of a voyage, but to them it feels like an adventure anyway. In the back of his mind, he keeps trying to come up with the perfect proposal, but suddenly they’re in their tiny guesthouse that’s decorated like a run-down grandmother’s home straight out of 1958, cuddled around each other in bed and she looks at him and smiles. It's a warm, _important _smile_._ Gently, she takes his head and draws it towards her, his face safe between her hands, and she whispers “Stan, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m seriously going to spend the rest of my life with you”

and it’s not a _question_, it’s never been a question, the look in her eyes is completely certain and calm

and he kisses her, murmurs “wait, Patty, Patty, wait”

gets up, naked and unashamed and shivering slightly from the unexpected cold, rummages through his backpack - aware of how unromantic it must look but the action feels like a compulsion, a need - until he pulls out the box

puts the ring on her finger and whispers back “Patty, I promise, the rest of my life.”

Of the two of them, he’s the one who’ll keep it.

Their wedding is small because they don’t have that many friends in New York yet and Patty doesn’t want to invite 500 relatives she hasn’t seen in years, most people from Harvard are scattered around the world and Stan’s parents feel more like strangers.

Patty hasn’t asked about that either, because it’s not like there’s anything to tell. When they meet up everyone is perfectly civil, it’s just that Stan has the distinct feeling that he barely remembers these people and from the slightly helpless, forced cheer of his mother, he suspects they’re feeling the same.

So the wedding is just the two of them and Patty’s friend Mila from grad school and his two former dorm mates Michael and James and James’ girlfriend Cira, who can only mostly hide her jealousy at _StanandPatty’s_ obvious bliss.

They sign the papers unceremoniously at the town hall, they’re both not that religious, but when their all sitting in their new flat that evening, Patty says, “we should do something Jewish, too.” She doesn’t say _I’m not sure if it counts otherwise _but Stan feels the same, like they need a higher authority’s blessing, or not a blessing even, but at least proof, proof that whatever fate might be running the world from the shadows, that this is the reality they choose. Neither of them verbalizes that feeling, of course, because it would be ridiculous.

So they get a glass and they step on it together and for a brief, uncomfortable moment Stan thinks, this is the broken temple, but he doesn’t really know what that means.

Of course they talk about children and slowly their conversations shift from “sure, one day in the future maybe” to “if it happens, it happens” and then finally to “if it would happen now, it would actually be kind of nice.”

It’s not that either of them desperately wants it - Patty always jokes that she counted on ending up as a crazy old cat lady and that for her it’s more than enough to know that at least she won’t have to take care of the cats alone and every time Stan tries to imagine children and childhood, he just… gets stuck, fails, runs into the strange white walls in his mind.

But Patty’s working part time at a small gallery in New York organizing exhibitions and events, occasionally writes articles in independent culture magazines and it’s all work she _could_ also mostly do from home. Stan rises through the ranks at Bank of America and they’re in their not-quite-late twenties on an income that might seriously hit six figures within the next decade or so, so it seems like the natural thing.

Nothing happens, though. They take a big European trip instead, visit Paris, London, Prague, Berlin.

It is in the back of their minds in Paris, because Patty is horribly jetlagged for the first day, so they spend 24 straight hours in bed and have frankly phenomenal amounts of sex (later Patty will joke that they managed to find exactly the sweet spot between being high on the aphrodisiac of being in Paris as a concept and being confronted with the stinking, overwhelming strange vibrancy of the city in the real world).

They don’t use protection and then Patty laughs with a dizzy sort of exhaustion between orgasms. Stan is happy, feels her fingers running through his hair until she makes a throwaway comment that their kid will probably end up a horrible snob if it was conceived in Paris. Suddenly (Salmonella-laced) there is the knowledge in Stan’s head, not premonition, not guess, not doubt, not feeling, _knowledge_ that their child won’t be a snob, because they won’t have any children at all. He stops breathing for a second and she, too, seems to sense something, because she leans over him and kisses him again.

They take up hobbies together, it’s usually Patty who gives the impulse, but Stan loves tagging along. He finds out he’s surprisingly good at knitting and - unsurprisingly - jigsaw puzzles and he loves doing watercolors, big lush floral field of green that feel like he’s seen them in another life and Patty tells him about color theory and the importance of green in renaissance art.

One time, he even paints a portrait of her. It takes him almost a week of focused, meticulous working and while in his opinion, it’s still not exactly right, despite the watercolors it's a bit too static to really look like her, she loves it so much she insists they hang it up in the kitchen.

In the mornings, when he stumbles out half-awake because his job starts three hours earlier than hers, he’s making coffee for the two of them (she doesn’t mind drinking it cold), he looks at it and he feels proud and happy and home.

Around Purim 1999, they adopt a cat, too, a tiny dirty scrawny kitten that looks two seconds away from death when they find it on the fire escape of their house. It has a triangular black spot on its head and when Stan tries to feed it ground beef and water, it scratches open his entire palm with its angry tiny paw.

(For a second, Stan looks at his palm and there’s a memory stinging unexpectedly, _that’s how we beat the Russkies, Stanley-_)

But then Patty returns from the other room where she’d been preparing a shoe box for the kitten to sleep in and she starts laughing so hard they both flinch. Stan is ripped out of his thoughts that were not even thoughts to begin with and he supposes they must be a sight. He’s wearing a grey wool sweater, the beef can in one hand and the other one bleeding and the kitten is on the floor hissing at him like he’s the most dangerous thing in the world.

“He attacked me,” he says indignantly and that’s when Patty decides their aggressive little Purim guest with the fitting spot over his eyes must be called Haman.

Somehow, the cat feels like a missing jigsaw puzzle piece that makes their life complete. Haman absolutely adores Patty, but he seems to be afraid of Stan. Whenever Patty's lying on the couch, curled up with the cat in her lap, and Stan comes to join them, he hisses and postures for at least five minutes, while Patty laughs. Oddly, it doesn't bother Stan, he's simultaneously totally enarmored by the fact that this very small, obviously traumatised creature would do anything to protect her. And on the other hand, it feels like confirmation, _cats have a sixth sense_ his mother had said, though Stan doesn't know why or when, and there seems to be something in Stan that Haman perceives as a threat.

The routine they settle into is nice, getting up in the morning, going to work, getting home in the evening, cuddling, trying to placate the cat, sex, talking, fun.

Except one morning in September, he's at work in his Bank of America office when Mike from the office next door rushes in and tells him to come watch the TV in the break room and that's how he watches the second tower come down in real time. He wasn’t that close to the World Trade Center, he usually works in his office in Midtown, and Patty’s gallery is also quite a bit away, it’s in the East Village, but when they rush home that day, they cling together in shock.

“I thought I lost you,” Patty whispers, over and over, she knew he wasn’t scheduled to be at the Twin Towers today, but he goes over to the headquarters spontaneously often enough that he _could have been_, he could have been. “Stan, I can’t lose you, promise me.”

Part of Stan is reminded, by the dust, by the panic, of things he doesn’t actually remember and from their place in Queens they hear the sirens, they watch the chaos, the TV running in the background and every time he looks at it he has to remind himself it’s not a promo for a new blockbuster movie, it’s the actual news.

“Promise me,” Patty says and Stan looks at her, looks her in the eyes.

“I promise,” he says. “I’m here, Patty, I’m not leaving,” and the names keep running through his mind, colleagues, friends who _did _work at the Towers today, Levi Greenberg, Carl Wells, Matthew Clements, Georgie Denbrough-

except-

except-

“I promise,” over and over again, they’re both crying, they’re both ignoring the telephone that keeps ringing non-stop as basically everyone they know is trying to call.

The city afterwards is strange, torn between shock and a wordless sense of solidarity. Stan feels things bubbling under the surface of his mind, dark, terrifying things. Most nights he wakes up screaming, wakes up to Patty’s hands stroking through his hair and even Haman, who used to still be somewhat prickly and stand-offish towards him, now curls up to him as if he’s trying to console Stan.

The days are even worse, going to work is a constant chaotic maelstrom of damage control and there are so many people from their office missing, though _missing_ is of course the wrong word, because everyone knows where they are.

“We should move,” Patty says after a month and there’s something in her eyes that makes Stan realize she’s absolutely serious. “We need to get out of New York. As soon as we can.”

Stan loves her more than the world, so he nods and asks “Why?”

Patty flinches as if she was afraid of that question. For a second she says nothing. “I’m worried about you” she admits finally, though she doesn’t get more specific. Just stands there in their living room, next to the shelves with Haman’s food, arms crossed protectively over her chest.

“I’m-” he takes a deep breath. He knows he’s been on edge lately, but then again so has everyone. It’s only been a fucking _month. _“I’m fine, I mean, work is hell right now and I wasn’t even in the towers, it’s not like anything actually happened to me, it’s going to be-”

“I’m not even sure it’s _about_ the towers,” she interrupts.

That shuts him up.

Not that he would ever be able to articulate it, but he isn’t sure about that either.

“Every night, you talk in your sleep,” she continues, obviously trying to keep her voice calm, but with stomach-sinking clarity he notices she’s on the verge of tears. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, it doesn’t make any sense, but last night you were _begging _someone not to kill you.”

He draws his eyebrows together because he doesn’t remember that, doesn’t remember anything about the dreams except the feeling of being so scared that it eats away at his existence like battery acid.

(_Like battery acid, Stan._)

“I know there are things you don’t tell me, and they never felt like they might actually harm us, but they do now.” The mere fact that Patty is bringing this up is _terrifying_, because that’s the kind of thing that sounds potentially marriage-ending, and he knows she’s right, he knows it’s absolutely unfair on every level, and he _would_ tell her but he doesn’t even know himself. But he also suddenly knows that his entire beautiful life that he loves more than anything is built on a giant sinkhole and that one day it might just collapse in on itself.

And that Patty, small brilliant Patty, who even a belligerent streetwise New York City cat like Haman treats like the best thing on Earth, would be caught in the downfall.

And as she hands him a stack of printed papers with job opportunities and house listings that must have taken her hours to compile (they’re neatly organized by salary and area and she even added notes with her personal opinion to each of them), he realizes that if that ever happened, it wouldn’t matter how much he’d scream at her to get out and save herself. She would stay by his side.

They move to Atlanta. At first they rent a flat, but Stan gets a good position with H &R Block and while he doesn’t make quite as much here as he did in New York, they’re still more than comfortable and end up buying a house only a few months later.

(He realizes the housing market is a bubble at this point, but Patty falls in love with hardwood floors and a big open patio and so he guesses they will be okay even if it does all inevitably pop like a balloon.)

It’s hard for her to find work at first and it serves as an uncomfortable reminder that she left the city she considered home and the job she loved without a second thought because she was worried about Stanley. "I love you," she says every time he comes even close to pointing that out. "I love you so much, Stan."

It takes her a while, but in spring she finds a project that’s doing art and literature workshops for poor kids from bad neighborhoods and she blooms into it, fills up their whole house with art supplies and pottery clay, though of course Stan’s watercolor portrait still has the place of honor on their wall. She’s getting paid next to nothing (in fact Stan suspects that she might spend more on the supplies and occasionally helping out families buy groceries or clothes than she ever made in the first place), but it doesn’t matter, he earns enough to support both of them, their mortgage is a joke and though Haman might be the most spoiled cat in the whole city, he is also pretty much their biggest expense.

“Do you ever regret it?” He asks one evening as they’re sitting on the couch eating dinner, he has to ask it, she looks so excited talking about the progress the kids made today. “That we don’t have children?”

She looks at him, her eyes soft with love and shakes her head, reaches out for him. Technically they are still in their late thirties, it _could _happen, it happens to some people and it’s not like they’ve used protection in over a decade, but somehow they’ve both accepted it as a truth. “I love you,” she murmurs. “This is the life I want to have.”

And the cat jumps on her lap, which he technically is not allowed while they’re eating, but she can save her vegetarian Spaghetti Carbonara on time, and it feels like the kind of moment that would be incomplete without him, anyway. Stan smiles and kisses her. “Yeah, me too.”

But Patty still doesn’t get pregnant and it’s the mid-2000s, they are both in their thirties now and hear a biological clock ticking faintly in the background, and one day she suddenly says “maybe we should get it checked out.”

It’s not so much that they need to have children, but Patty worries that there might be a serious biological issue behind it, a friend of hers had recently gotten cervical cancer, and Stan pokes at the weird walls in his head and _wants _to tear them down, wants to get to the bottom of this. So they make a few phone calls, set up a few doctor's appointments.

The examinations at the fertility clinic are weird and invasive and surprisingly humiliating and while they both take it with as much humor as they can, Stan can’t help but think that if he genuinely desperately wanted a child this would feel like actual torture. The doctors all either give completely unhelpful tips for their sex life - _have you tried being relaxed? -_ or treat them with a condescending pity, like they’re defective, even though test after test reveals that they’re fine.

“You know, talking to these doctors always makes me want to stay childless out of pure spite,” Patty says before an appointment and Stan knows what she means, one nurse actually referred to her as a _hopeful mommy_, and yet it’s all wiped away when they’re sitting in the room and the doctor comes in to discuss the latest rounds of tests.

Discussing the particulars of your sperm with a strange man is uncomfortable in general, but Stan is also developing a specific hatred of Dr. Miller. The man is unsympathetic, unfriendly and keeps making inappropriate, innuendo-laden jokes. But even he has to concede that Stan has some of the healthiest sperm that he has ever seen (Stan doesn’t drink, smoke or eat too unhealthily if you discount the occasional night when Patty’s on her – perfectly normal, scarily punctual - period and they kill a tub of ice cream together) and it’s a sign of how absurd their entire situation is that Stan actually takes that as a personal victory.

(But then he suddenly he wishes Dr. Miller would laugh, reveal it as yet another inappropriate joke, say, _actually Mr. Uris, I’m sorry to say you have testicular cancer, maybe it has even spread to your brain, are you perhaps experiencing memory loss? Oh yes, your entire childhood? I'm sorry to say, it sounds like you’re dead.)_

Instead, he tells them that there’s nothing the clinic can actually do for them, which he seems to take as an insult against both his person and profession, and wishes them a frosty good day.

“So,” Patty says as soon as they’re outside “not only was that an all-around horrible experience, but also apparently completely pointless” and Stan doesn’t know how to react, because deep deep down, he knows it’s his fault.

He knows if he told her that, she’d brush it off, call him Mr. American Sperm, make a joke about it, but he's also certain that on some level, she knows it too.

“We’re like Abraham and Sara, then” she sums it up, “except probably without the late-life miracle. But you know what? I think it might be better that way.”

She doesn’t say _why,_ doesn’t even know enough about it to do that, but it’s in her tone and it’s the closest either of them has come to saying it out loud. So they both pretend she’s talking about careers, or international travel, or Haman, all things they love incredibly much. She takes Stan’s hand and puts her head on his shoulder and Stan’s voice is breaking as he says, “yeah, it’s better this way.”

They stand like that for a minute, but then suddenly they both start laughing. They get ice cream on their way home.

Stan starts his own consulting firm specializing mostly in corporate financing in 2006 and somehow, by 2008 it feels like the only company in the city that’s not on the verge of bankruptcy, mostly by being able to capitalize on the power vacuum caused by all the established banking giants stumbling around in the blind panic of the crisis while also miraculously avoiding being stepped on or crushed.

“It’s mostly luck,” Stan tells people at a dinner party where they gather to place bets on whether this will be over before it will become like 1929 or if it will become 1929 or if it will just keep going and he really, really wishes it is.

“The end of the fucking world is what it feels like,” Rendmann says, he’s one of the corporate debris being washed ashore in the wake of Lehman Brothers and Stan laughs. He hadn’t known the all-American capitalists could even get scared.

“The end of the world is nothing like this.”

For a second, there’s an awkward silence and from the looks Rendmann exchanges with his fellow shipwrecked companions whose names Stan has already forgotten, he knows they’re realizing that Stan was BoA in New York City in 2001. It’s not what he was talking about, but it comes closest.

“Whatever,” Rendmann says finally. “At least we got champagne.”

(_Yeah we got champagne, _Stan thinks. _Champagne and Coca fucking Cola. Let’s see where that’ll leave us in the end._)

All things considered, the downfall of capitalism is less exciting and especially less permanent than Stan expected and a few weeks later, he’s sitting down with Patty for dinner.

“I just can’t hear it anymore,” she complains. “Everybody crying about the fucking banks. There are kids in this country that are hungry because they can’t afford to eat. There are brilliant people who’ll end up on the streets or in prison because the education system doesn’t give a shit about them if they can’t afford college. There are still people living in emergency shelters from fucking Katrina.” This is the other side of her job, she often comes home incredibly angry.

Stan can handle her anger. It's her occasional feeling of _helplessness_ about the world that he's giving his best to fight. He isn't sure how, so he does the methodological thing, he tries to find solutions.

So her outburst leads to a discussion about how to sustainably address structural financial disadvantages and _that _leads to the spur-of-the-moment midnight establishment of the Uris Foundation, which sounds more serious and formal than a tiny good idea on a couch should have any right to. But it turns out Patty does have the trust of some of her workshop kids, because as soon as Mrs. Uris puts word on the street that her bigshot banker husband would be willing to co-finance and support startups from low-income neighborhoods, they find themselves bombarded with unconventional ideas from passionate young entrepreneurs.

Of course, not all of them are realistic from a business perspective (Stan shoots down about 400 different eighteen-year olds with no formal experience or connections whatsoever wanting to found their own rap label), but there are also dozens of success stories, small restaurants, corner shops, beauty studios, a nursery school. There’s also the occasional weirdness, like Al, the sixteen year old high school kid who builds a code-wise truly impressive website to rate the hotness of female teachers from all the public schools in Atlanta. Stan gets him to take it down immediately and then sets up a job interview with one of his own former consulting clients who’s now running a dotcom business out of Palo Alto. A few months later Al sends him a long, excited email stating that after his high school diploma, he got the offer to work for Microsoft.

After that, Stan starts asking around some of his old colleagues and more than a few are willing to provide internship positions for poor black high school kids, provided that Stan does the vetting and paperwork. It adds another few hours to his 50 hour weeks, but at least this he gets to do together with Patty.

It comes together in a weirdly symbiotic way, Patty and Stan and the foundation. “We might not have kids,” Patty puts it one evening, “but in a way, all of them are ours. The whole world.”

Stan hums, he knows what she means. He hasn’t had nightmares in a very long time.

In 2012 they take a three-month trip to Israel and as they’re standing in front of the Western Wall, Stan feels unexpectedly, perfectly happy.

This temple, crushed, he thinks the thought of his wedding - and Patty next to him - and it’s not a scary thought in any way. There _was _a higher authority in his life, he remembers, though he doesn’t know the specifics anymore

(the turtle)

(but the turtle couldn’t help us)

and on a universe-wide scale, maybe it’s still there, maybe God is still there, too, but suddenly Stan is aware how much of his childhood was spent being told to mourn this temple, or to appeal to the God it had been built for, and how much of the actual tangible good he has seen in his life was not caused by supernatural forces or as the answer of prayers, but by people making the very human choice to be kind.

“I’m glad we’re here together,” he says to Patty and suddenly realizes she is crying.

“I’m glad,” she chokes out. “I’m so glad, too.”

They don’t split up to pray at the men’s and women’s section separately. It would defeat the point.

They left Haman with Patty’s friend Kaisha, and he is mad at them for four weeks after they return, he’s getting older by now and it takes a lot of tuna and backrubs until he forgives them for abandoning him. Patty hangs up a painted Hamsa they bought in Jerusalem over their living room door.

“To keep the evil out,” Patty says, laughing and it hits Stan unexpectedly. He remembers, contextless and by pure mental muscle memory, the feeling of trying to grasp for anything to protect himself. It’s not about faith, he thinks, and it’s not about painted trinkets, it’s an action, the active decision to care about the world.

But her decorating their house is an action, it's a sign of love and of _home,_ so he nods and smiles and goes back to the paperwork he has to catch up on, a hair salon that’s being opened by three teenaged mothers, an Ethiopian restaurant, a tattoo shop. Life goes on.

The next Saturday, Stan and Patty decide to go out for a picnic, they make sandwiches and brownies decorated with fruit. Their kitchen is the friendly kind of chaos and when Stan crouches down to get Tupperware containers out of the lower cabinet, suddenly something catches his eye. There, randomly tucked between the cook books, is the bird book Patty gave him for Chanukkah almost two decades ago.

On a whim, he pulls it out, opens it, spends a while looking at the small illustrations of the various species. Spontaneously, he packs it in the picnic basket, too.

They end up birdwatching on a bench in a park and even though they mostly encounter pigeons and sparrows, they both always laughingly compare them with the book to make absolutely sure. They’re full of food and love and happiness and there’s one sandwich left over that they feed to the birds. Afterwards, Patty puts her head on Stan’s shoulder and he thinks he wants to spend the rest of his time on Earth hearing her breathe.

They fill their life up like that, with the birds and their aging cat and international travel, with young people who want to do stuff with their lives and with each other, most of all.

It’s not that they are unaware of evil, they encounter it daily in all its petty, banal forms, discrimination, abuse, apathy, poverty. And the thing is, they _do _fight it, never in its entirety of course, but in tiny, hard-won steps, neatly documented in bureaucratic tax return letters of the businesses they helped set up, growth reports, thank-you letters after interships, every page irrefutable proof of their secular successes.

_We _are doing this, Stan thinks, and God isn’t on their side and fate isn’t either, it’s them and their friends and people they don't even know. They won’t win this, he knows that, too, the best they can do is level the playing field as much as possible for some future generation who might have a genuine shot. But it's theirs and it's enough.

So when the first signs appear that the sinkhole under his life is collapsing, when he sees a horror novel by the author William Denbrough and, unlike before, his mind doesn’t skip over them because he never much cared for the genre but instead flinches and thinks, _Bill, _Stanley Uris doesn’t get angry, instead he gets a lawyer to draw up his will.

Patty will never forgive him for this, he knows that, but she’ll be well cared for and Haman is still there, too, although he sometimes struggles to walk these days and only eats the special old-cat diet food. But they will be fine. And they will keep fighting.

He’s dreading it, of course, the way one can only ever truly dread the inevitable, but he’s read all of Bill’s books and found that he hated the world in every single one of them. The Hamsa is still hanging over the door (_but the turtle couldn’t help us_) and the watercolor portrait of Patty is hanging in the next room and he still loves her as much as he did when he spent an entire week trying to commit every tiny detail of her face to paper, even though there are so many new lines in her face now.

When the phone rings, he knows it immediately. Patty’s on the couch, she just booked a trip to Buenos Aires and it rips his heart out, hurts worse than he even thought possible. He _wants _to go with her. He wants to bury his face in her hair and cry until she soothes him and comes up with a solution. But he also remembers her handing him the stack of papers when she wanted to leave New York and he knows that she _would_, she wouldn’t let him go without her, she’d look at him and just know, she’d throw herself and their entire painstakingly built paper world into the fire to save him and he could not let her do that, because he loves her and he loves that world.

And he thinks of Bill and Bev and Ben and Mike and Eddie and Richie (all of them, he loved all of them) depending on a faith he never could really fathom and in the end it’s very simple. He picks up the phone.

“Hey Stanley, I don’t know if you remember me, it’s Mike Hanlon,” and when Stan says it’s nice to hear from him, it’s the absolute truth- it’s so, so _good _to hear Mike’s voice.

But Stan has learned a lot in the meantime and the absolute truth is also that the turtle couldn’t help them. The truth is that evil is systematic, not just a disembodied alien feeding on horror movie clichés, but a whole town, a whole country, a whole world full of people, _human beings_, ignoring murders and hate crimes and oppression because they choose to do so. He only has a vague notion of IT, but he knows they were wrong about its nature as children. It is this adult understanding, he knows, which makes it unkillable, gives it its little crevices and cracks in which it survives.

So Stanley takes a last look at his paperwork, his ballpoint-ink-written defense of humanity and he thinks, the world is what you make it. It’s an exchange and you only get back what you put in.

(He looks at Patty and smiles.)

As he walks up the stairs to the bathroom, he thinks _I refuse to engage with it on this level, I refuse to even accept it as real,_ and it’s as good a declaration of war as any.

He does not go to heaven after he dies.


End file.
